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Léna Piquet
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Shaders Experiments

This page regroups some research and development around various effects I tried to build for different projects or ideas.


Time Distortion

After playing the game Quantum Break I wanted to give a try at some effects inspired by the game. Mainly things about mesh deformation. The idea was to simulate some kind of frozen effect which would alter a character or object in the world to the point of stretching it.

I started with some sine waves offsets on the mesh vertex positions, then added some particles on top to create some chromatic aberration. I then refined the effect with some additional colors on the mesh itself:

The effect is not meant to be permanent but instead tied to a horizontal wave pattern which would affect the whole scene geometry:

I also tried to give a pattern to the wave itself to make it more interesting to look at:


Police Lights

For a blog-post on the Substance website I wanted to showcase some effects inside Substance Painter, the blog-post is available here. I wanted to showcase animated shaders, so one thing I tried was animating the emissive color. I replicated some light patterns that I saw in some American police videos:


Animated Materials Blending

A second effect I wanted to showcase in Substance Painter is the ability to build mask designed for blending between materials. Mostly to get interesting looking transitions between materials. I tried two different cases: snow accumulation and alien/organic corruption.

The snow accumulation is actually pretty simple and use the Ambient Occlusion texture as the main driver, combined with some noises. The alien corruption is a bit more complicated. To simulate a growing effect I actually convert the binary mask into a normal map and use it as a 2D offset to push in or out the material at the mask borders. This gives the impression that the material expand or grow on the surface.

Here is a video on how I made the snow blending mask: